Viking
Practices, Especially as Regards Women

copyright 1996 by Freyadisa

Vikings are, by definition, raiders, pirates, and bandits.
A lot of Norse never went viking, and joining a viking band once
is often worth noting in a memorial stone. There is a slight split
in the culture between the full-time warrior, usually a viking,
and the full-time farmer, rarely a viking, but the difference
is never hard. Often it is a matter of opportunity and economics,
as well as training, age, and personality. The Norse are the last
European culture to retain the concept of weapons and war-training
as the right of all free men, not just an upper class of warrior-nobility.
This alone marks them as a remnant of ancient, Germanic, pagan,
egalitarian culture in a feudal, aristocratic, phallicist, autocratic,
and Christian continent.

Personality as well as birth into warrior families accounts
for most female vikings, perhaps one to five percent of the total
number of raiders. Only one has a saga named after her, and that
often considered but part of a king's saga, but many of the women
in sagas have arms training, and fight beside brothers, husbands,
or lovers. A number of female viking captains are noted by foreign
chroniclers, with female, mixed, or male crews. Undoubtedly many
women went unremarked as common crew. Someone being pillaged is
too busy running, fighting, or dying to check to see if beardlessness
is youth or femininity. Armour by its weight flattens the best
curves and aids androgyny.

Breast-cup armour, as seen on opera Brunhildas, has no historicity.
It would be uncomfortable, channeling the force of blows on the
breast straight to the ribs; inconvenient, sticking a pair of
metal bowls out in the way of your upper arm; and dangerous, as
any weapon striking inboard of the tips would be immediately funneled
towards the center of the chest. Women wore the same chain, splint,
or scale armour as a man their size who had good chest expansion
and pectoral development.

Female vikings are often of the upper classes, at least the
captains mentioned, but then so are the male captains. The very
concept of nobility is variable in Norse culture, both from north
to south and early to late. These women warriors come from all
sexual orientations, heterosexual, homosexual, and neuter. They
are usually described as beautiful or at least handsome, indicating
masculine admiration for their warlike qualities. Our culture,
after all, assumes female warriors are "battle axes"
with foul temperments, man-haters, and/or old maids too ugly to
get a man.

Speaking of women and vikings, a word often connected with
viking raids, "rapine," has nothing at all to do with
our concept of "rape."

Rapine is best translated to contemporary English as abduction
or kidnapping. It has no sexual component. Rapine is mentioned
by chroniclers as practiced on communities of monks by vikings.
Considering that most raids are conducted in the face of at least
some opposition, there simply isn't time to safely abuse women
on the spot. What happens once they are carrried off is up to
the individual viking, but the rape even of slaves is not condoned
nor encouraged in their culture. Rape-mentality must not be assumed
simply because it is common in our culture.

After all, it is among the Norse that one hears of beautiful
woman slaves being courted by the free men round about, rather
than raped by any and all who take a fancy to her.

Raiding is done for the purpose of getting gold and silver,
or valuables that could be turned into ready cash. This includes
taking younger and stronger members of the community to sell as
slaves, or important-looking ones to ransom back to their relatives.
That is rapine. For foreign women worth ransoming, it would preclude
sex, forced or voluntary, as their culture declared them worthless
if they might be carrying an illegitimate child.

Why has this been forgotten? On the one hand, language has
changed recently. Many of us nowadays are operating with a fairly
small vocabulary, and guessing - badly! - at the rest rather than
keeping a dictionary handy as we read. In the Bowdlerized, sex-is-never-mentioned
Victorian age, the word "rape" could be used in family
publications because it had no sexual component. When Bullfinch
speaks of the Greek myth of "the rape of Helen," he
is referring to her being abducted from her lawful home by Paris
(even with her conivance), not to her being sexually forced. In
Pope's pseudo-epic poem, The Rape of the Lock, any sexual reference
is obviously silly, since it is about a lock of hair being stolen.

On the other hand, filling in any horrible crime fits easily
in with the Medieval demonization of those terrible, pagan invaders
who committed all outrages imaginable. Similar is the later creation
of the Gothic witch who eats babies and kisses goats' rears, or
the Jew who murders Christian children to use their blood in Passover
matzoh.

In line with this demonization are infamous viking tortures,
like the "blood eagle." Supposedly this involved performing
various crude and unfriendly surgeries on living men to cause
a prolonged and hideous death, but it has now been proved to be
a complete fiction invented by a couple of Christian writers (who
must have had sick sadistic imaginations). So when you read of
the "blood eagle" in a novel, or a history, the author
is way out of date on his or her research.

About the worst the Norse ever did is to set fire to halls
that were being too stoutly defended, giving those inside the
choice of burning to death or facing steel. In the sagas and reliable
chronicles, death as dealt by the vikings is usually pretty quick.

So near as we can tell, the fortunate Norse simply were allowed
by their culture to live such uninhibited lives that they didn't
need to be sadistic, and did not tie together sex and violence.
The men did not hate and fear women, and so had no need to either
rape them, or keep them in weaponless subjection.

<<For a bibliography to support these remarks,
see the Dark Ages Bibliography to which I have contributed items>>